-The Hindu Why did the West Bengal girls’ welfare scheme win the UN Public Service Award this year? In 2014, Rehana (name changed), a 15-year old from a school in West Bengal’s Sunderbans region, was rescued from a red light area in Delhi. The Class IX student had been ensnared by traffickers who then sold her off in Kolkata. After being brought back, the local administration and a non-governmental organisation (NGO) re-enrolled...
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UN honours Mamata Banerjee with highest public service award for girl child project Kanyashree -Indrajit Kundu
-India Today West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has been awarded the highest public service honour by the United Nations for her project on girl child empowerment- Kanyashree. In a major boost to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's pet project 'Kanyashree', the United Nations today accorded its highest award for public service to the West Bengal government for the scheme initiated to empower the girl child with education. The project was launched in 2011...
More »Pregnant Women Entitled to Rs 6,000: Maternity scheme gets Rs 2,700 crore, experts say not enough - Shalini Nair
-The Indian Express The scheme grants Rs 6,000 to pregnant and lactating women who go for institutional delivery and vaccinate their children. The much-talked about maternity benefit entitlement of Rs 6,000 per woman, announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on December 31, 2016, has received a meagre allocation of Rs 2,700 crore. This is not even a quarter of the estimate drawn up by civil society groups that have been long demanding...
More »Amid fewer child deaths worldwide, high of 1.3 milion is in India -Anuradha Mascarenhas
-The Indian Express Global Burden of Death: world health improves but progress is patchy; Bangladesh betters India in reducing maternal deaths Pune: Between 1990 and 2015, deaths of children under five have gone down by half worldwide but India has had the highest number of such deaths at 1.3 million in 2015. India has pulled down maternal deaths but Bangladesh has done better, according to the Global Burden of Disease 2015 study...
More »Clearing the air on LPG -Siddharth George & Arvind Subramanian
-The Indian Express Several questions have been raised about our estimates of the savings from the DBT scheme for cooking gas. But all parties accept that the programme reduced subsidised sales by 24 per cent. Direct cash transfers have the potential to improve the economic lives of the poor by transferring benefits to households quickly and directly. Achieving these benefits requires thoughtful design of schemes, and careful, rigorous analysis of ongoing...
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